Melinda Willis

WSKG Arts is proud to partner with the Corning Museum of Glass for a series of features highlighting their past resident artists.

Melinda Willis is a glass artist who works out of the Canberra Glassworks studio in Australia. Her recent work has resulted in a series that examines the materiality of architectural glass through its transparency, reflectivity and optic qualities. Says Willis, “Glass is a material that I investigate conceptually because it compresses, reflects, and reinterprets space.” Her layering of fused and slumped sheet glass with digital imagery results in works that Willis hopes to be “vehicles for experiential and perceptual encounters.”

Willis holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from both the Australian National University and the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia. In 2012, she presented two solo exhibitions, Transference at the Smokestack Gallery of Canberra Glassworks in Canberra, Australia and Space Dissolving at the Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre in Canberra, Australia.

In her March 2013 Residency at The Studio, she continued to explore layering and imagery. Through casting, slumping, laminating, and cold working techniques, combined with the use of ceramic decals and mirrored elements, Willis constructed complex assembled glass pieces.

“Through the materiality of glass, my work invites the viewer to experience oneself momentarily captured within the illusory space that is the window of a building, a revolving door, or glass clad facade of a skyscraper. By combining the different perceptions of glass; as an omnipresent industrial material, as a medium for expression and an intermediary for an everyday urban experience, I aim to construct works that are not only deconstructed and dislocated, but echo a close familiarity of delineated space that everybody has encountered at some point in time.”

This segment was produced by the Corning Museum of Glass.

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